Luke Goodrich, VP and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the archdiocese, said: “Courts can’t decide what it means to be Catholic—only the Church can do that. By keeping the judiciary out of religious identity, the Indiana Supreme Court just protected all religious institutions to be free from government interference in deciding their core religious values.”
“The court’s decision today was a commonsense ruling in favor of our most fundamental rights,” said Goodrich. “Religious schools will only be able to pass down the faith to the next generation if they can freely receive guidance from their churches on what their faith is. We are grateful the court recognized this healthy form of separation of church and state.”
The lawsuit against the archdiocese was filed by Joshua Payne-Elliott, a former teacher at Cathedral High School in Indianapolis. In 2017, Payne-Elliott entered a same-sex marriage with another Catholic school teacher in the archdiocese, Layton Payne-Elliott.
According to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, an attorney for the archdiocese, the archdiocese for two years considered what action to take before instructing both Cathedral High and Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School, where Layton Payne-Elliott taught, that their employment could not continue. The same-sex marriage had violated Church teaching, the archdiocese said.
Brebeuf refused the archbishop’s request, and the archdiocese in response revoked the school’s “Catholic” status. That revocation is on hold, as the school appealed to the Congregation for Catholic Education.
Cathedral High School, however, terminated Joshua Payne-Elliott’s contract in June 2019. After reaching a settlement with the school, he filed a lawsuit against the archdiocese in August 2019.